chessandlena.com

First snow of 2009-2010 is on the ground, and still lightly falling. Not much at all, but it's making the park by our backyard look like a park covered with yummy frosting.

Hi, winter! Nice to see you.

So I'm shopping yesterday. On my neverending quest for a shampoo that smells the way I want it, which is wild grass, meadow, that kind of thing. For a good long while, there were quite a few brands with that scent, but they've been gone from the shelves for already a few years. This summer I was pleasantly surprised when Lena bought a Russian shampoo in Estonia, and it had that scent. I have just a bit left.

Anyway, I've largely given up on finding that scent again, since it's been so long. Of late, my quest is more of a "find a shampoo that doesn't smell like burnt plastic or sickly-sweet exotic fruit vomit" than "find lush meadow grassy smell".

So I'm smelling shampoos. Most of them. Yeah, I know it's weird. I opened one murky green bottle claiming aloe vera, cucumber, and something else that some genius decided worked with that already dubious combo... and I couldn't smell it. At all. So... I give it a light tap, hoping that would puff out some fragrance. Nothing. Another light squeeze, still nothing. A slightly stronger squeeze... and blorch. I now have shampoo up my nose, on my nose, in my mustache, on my glasses... smooth.

"Aw, man," I said. A little girl, maybe 8, shopping with her mother at the other end of the aisle, heard me and looked over.

"Ewww," she said, wrinkling her nose. I realize that with the swampy green color of this shampoo, I probably looked like I have somehow unleashed the flood gates on a reservoir of snot.

I remain, ladies, quite the charmer. In every situation.

So every other summer or so, we get some kind of infestation here in Sticky Hall. The first year it was wasps; the second it was ants (and spiders); the third, it was kittens; the fourth, wasps again; the fifth, ladybugs; last year, again with the spiders; and this year, something new-- crickets!

What the hell? What earthly set of causes gives rise to a cricket infestation? Yet here we are, I've killed probably fifty or more this summer, and disposed of almost twice that number.

Lena has cracked me up a few times this infestation without meaning to. One morning, I come into the kitchen to her saying, "Ooowwwhh..." in her this is very tragic voice. There was a cricket with only one leg remaining scrabbling across the floor. She asked me in the same voice, "take care of it?"

"You can't just kill it yourself? Take a shoe, or a paper towel...?"

"Oh, but it only has one leg... don't kill it!" I stopped tearing off the paper towel from the roll, then waited until she was out of the room and killed it. I'm a sensitive, animals-should-not-be-mistreated kind of guy, but insects are not animals. If I'm blowing karma by killing bugs, then I'm already going to be a cockroach for my next fifty lives. Sorry, Brahma, but that's how I roll.

I'm reminded of a story about my grandfather. He used to kill rabbits which were destroying his garden-- he viewed them as pests and only pests. But his two granddaughters, my older sisters, wailed and wailed when they found out he was killing cute little bunnies. "There are humane traps," they cried. "You can trap them and release them somewhere far away, so they won't get back into your garden." After he'd had enough, my grandfather bought a humane trap and set it, and soon caught a bunny, much to my sisters' delight and to the easing of their tormented souls. Then my grandfather picked up the rabbit in the humane trap, took it to a pond, and drowned it.

I couldn't do such a thing-- I'm way too cutificated by the little furry bunnies myself-- but it gives me no end of mortified laughter to remember what a character my grandfather was.

On another occasion of finding a cricket with just one leg remaining, Lena asked, "how is it that so many of them only have one leg...?" I didn't have to answer, just gestured to the cat that wandered through the room at that moment. Some questions almost answer themselves. I've seen it a couple of times now-- cat finds shiny, bouncy, unpredictable new toy that makes loud, shrill noise when you squish it... noise good! Play more! Then toy stops making noise. Boring. Leave toy noiselessly thrashing in middle of floor, go whine for drink from bathtub tap.

Anyway, there are quite a few tales of death, mayhem, and other amusements that we've amassed over the years with my family having such a morbid, macabre, and black sense of humor, and possessing three carnivores that have no lack of skill when it comes to killin'. But I suppose for now, I'll just sit back and listen to the peaceful chirruping of the crickets. And the occasional scream.

Today I uprooted three very young saplings and an absolutely gorgeous blooming sunflower.

It was done intentionally and with malice aforethought.

The location is why:

The tree in the background is the Colonel, a majestic cottonwood that drops a crap-ton of fluff, sticks, and cotton-pod hulls on our house every year. It occurred to Lena and I after seeing the sunflower that we hadn't really cleaned out the gutters yet this year. What's more, neither one of us could remember doing it last fall, either. Evidently there's some good nutrimenty stuff in there, if a sunflower can pop up out of nowhere like that.

Never before have I felt taunted by a flower.

Lena and I made a mad dash to The Home Country in a rental van (cue James Earl Jones saying, "BIG sonuvabitch..."), to pick up boxes of mom's pictures and what of her furniture we claimed from her estate. It was fast and furious, and very much aided and expedited by Dad, who loaned us his Mercury SUV for general use while in town so we didn't have to truck all over the Big Wheel in our 14-foot Red-October-class moving van.

When we got in, there was one thing that puzzled me:

What do you think? I wasn't really sure at all upon first glance.

Well, maybe *where* we found it will help:

Still no thoughts? Weird mag-lev cup holding device? Emergency ejector seat rip handle? Quick-draw tracking device?

Nope. It all comes down to this-- Dad hates wearing his seatbelt. This is a device he made to click into the belt buckle so it doesn't squawk that his seatbelt isn't fastened.

Awesome!

Well, hell, this smacks of all the cardinal virtues of a programmer as outlined by Larry Wall, godfather of Perl: laziness, impatience, and hubris. If Dad had been born in a slightly later era, I bet he would have been a programmer.

Okay, maybe a sysadmin.

Here's a NYT writeup about Sriracha, a hot sauce that I learned about years ago and use for many many things... and Lena hates many many ways. Apparently it leaves a unique aroma on the breath that defeats Russians the same way garlic defeats a vampyre.

Today is our 13th wedding anniversary. Ooooh yeah. We celebrated yesterday by going down to Indy for dinner with Salah (it was his birthday, too) at La Jolla Cantina, then a little dancing at Vogue, both in Broadripple. We're celebrating today by having severe bloating in our abdomens, along with the constant feeling that we have to dump our guts. Thanks, dubiously-sanitary restaurant!

We've gotten down to business in the former kittenry, former junk room, pending guest room. The walls now bear a coat of white primer and a coat of barely-noticeably-bluish-off-white (or, as I like to call it, "white") paint; the molding is stripped from the base of the walls, and the disturbing crack in the concrete slab has two applications of sealing pseudo-concrete, with probably two more needed. After the sealant is done, it's a coat (maybe two) of de-odorizing primer for the floor, then on to laminate flooring.

Cut the back grass today, which was attaining lush-jungle-growth status. It's also cottonwood nuclear winter in our neighborhood, which means that at any given moment for the next week or so, you will see large puffy flakes of cottonwood puff all through the air. It collects on certain lawns and in wind-dead-ends. Looks kind of pretty in a grumbly, bet-this-shit-sticks-to-my-car kind of way.

Also went shopping to Meijer, where they finally had sparkling water 2 liters (interesting, btw, that the 2-liter bottle is about the only remnant of the metric system we see commonly in the US anymore...), so I picked up a bunch. A lady standing in front of the bottled water and reading all the labels on everything asked me about them, so we talked about trying to detox from aspartame, soda, etc.

Gotta go. Dinner's ready. Chicken and potatoes. Po-ta-toes? Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew...?

So I'm sitting here, thinking of different possible things to blog about, when in a bit of random surfing, this vital tool pops up. How the hell did I manage before this?

Just making sure everything's still standing.

Here's a chat excerpt from bash.org's quote DB:

<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> thats neat, I didnt know IRC did that
<Cthon98> yep, no matter how many times you type hunter2, it will show to us as *******
<AzureDiamond> awesome!
<AzureDiamond> wait, how do you know my pw?
<Cthon98> er, I just copy pasted YOUR ******'s and it appears to YOU as hunter2 cause its your pw
<AzureDiamond> oh, ok.

check out the latest XKCD. If you don't understand it, see this thread.